Not long ago, while I was in Europe, another American, one who assumed I was liberal, approached me. He hoped I would commiserate with him about what a jerk Donald Trump is. When I failed to respond as expected, he turned tail without allowing me to explain.
Nowadays this is a common phenomenon. As a nation, we are at a moral impasse. Both liberals and conservatives believe they have the moral high ground and hence will concede nothing to the other side. Indeed, they often fail to listen to one another.
This moral paralysis has poisoned the atmosphere. It has left a bitter taste in our collective mouths, with millions of us wondering if there is a way to resolve the standoff.
When I was very young, I confronted a similar dilemma. My mother generally sought to control me by moral means. I was routinely made to feel guilty if I did not capitulate to her demands. Some one, I was told, had to be the good one by giving in—and this was my responsibility.
The problem with this approach, however, was that it regularly left me on the losing end. As a consequence, when I entered college I studied philosophy so that I could understand what was truly ethical. Unfortunately, this did not work. The standard theories were themselves stalemated.
Later on, when I became a sociologist, I sought to understand the nature of morality. Since judgments of right and wrong were social, they might presumably be studied empirically. In fact, they could. As a result, I made enormous progress in developing a “tripartite” theory of morality.
In works such as Hardball without an Umpire,I explained how informal moral rules are negotiated and enforced. Nonetheless, this put me no closer to identifying the specifics of proper conduct. In order to achieve this, I needed a better grasp of the challenges we, as a society, confront.
These came into sharper focus once I realized that we were in the midst of a Middle Class Revolution. Having created a mass techno-commercial society, it could not be sustained unless more of us became professionalized. We needed to be self-directed specialists who could independently make valid decisions.
But this required a dependable moral compass. Unless we were principled realists, we would not make appropriate choices. This, regrettably, would be to the detriment of the millions of strangers who depended upon us. The ensuing lack of trust could prove fatal to our shared welfare.
And so I searched for principles suitable for our current condition; principles that commanded the allegiance of liberals andconservatives. These had to bridge the gap between the social justice of the left and the traditional values of the right.
In the end, I settled on honesty, personal responsibility, fairness(defined as the same rules for all), liberty,and family stability. Readers of my columns will be familiar with this quintet of values. Here the difficulty, however, is that they are not easy to explain within the confines of short essays.
This prompted me to write a book—my eighteenth. It is entitled A Principled Society: Cultivating Trust in a World of Strangers, which is now available on Amazon as an inexpensive paperback.
Our world has changed. The moral answers that served our ancestors no longer meet our requirements. We are thus in desperate need of reform. We require standards—widely respected standards—that provide genuine justice, as opposed to ideological twaddle.
Trying to resolve unprecedented obstacles with outdated tools has set us at each other’s throats. This was not because either side of the moral divide is uniquely evil. Rather, it is because few of us have recognized the nature of the impediments we face or accepted that refurbished paradigms are necessary.
Too often our moral conduct is reflexive. We respond in ways we were taught instead of ways that match our immediate circumstances. If we are to restructure what we do, we must therefore stand back and look at the larger picture. What tenets, we must ask, apply to our present situation?
After a lifetime of attempting to come to grips with personal quandaries, I hope I have identified answers that are also valid on a larger sphere. This, of course, will be for others to judge.
Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
Kennesaw State University
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